Institutions protect their data by developing backup and recovery systems. With virtual technology, the cost to develop, maintain, or extend backup and recovery systems can be controlled. Virtual backup and recovery technologies developed using deduplicating storage systems are available from EMC® Corporation of Hopkinton, Mass. Using such technologies, virtual machines (VMs) can be employed to perform backup of data, including but not limited to, virtual machine images and other data files (e.g., text file, programs, applications, server authentication information, etc.). Throughout this disclosure, such a backup virtual machine is referred to as a virtual backup appliance (VBA).
Typically a VBA is maintained within a VM. It can be deleted or removed and redeployed. In some other cases, a user may want to wipe off everything associated with a VBA and start over again. When a VBA is deleted, there may be some stale metadata and/or the actual data of the deleted VBA in other places such as a backup application. Such removal of a VBA is referred to as decommission of a VBA. Decommission is useful in cleaning up stake backups and restart. It is also useful when the backup software rolls back and hence the VBA becomes stale. It has been a lack of an efficient mechanism to allow a user to initiate efficient decommission of VBAs.